Life on both sides of the paywall. Advertising no longer keeps content free
Hermès doesn't advertise on bus stops
The familiar internet with its free content is quietly disappearing. And not because of AI, but because advertisers risk losing their audience… the paying audience that will become inaccessible to them.
Advertising has been the main sponsor of internet content production for many years, and it’s what kept that content free. But something has started to change...
Recently, my favorite stand-up club launched a Patreon where you can get more good content for money than on their YouTube channel. Late last year, Polish auto YouTuber Budda left the platform for a paywall, launching his own streaming service. He openly admitted that advertising monetization doesn’t cover the cost of content production. Almost every reasonably notable project now has its own paywall, and some have simply gone paid-first.
Is advertising which drove the development of the open internet for several decades starting to fall short? The conclusion feels counterintuitive, given the sheer volume of ads on YouTube, Instagram, and everywhere else. But I want to draw attention to something different.
Quietly and almost imperceptibly, privacy has become a commodity. Major platforms have already launched, or are launching, services that let users buy themselves out of ad targeting essentially selling the right not to see ads. An ad-free Instagram subscription costs €8 per month (available in the EU), YouTube stops torturing you with mid-roll ads every ten minutes for $14, Snapchat for €10, and TikTok and Meta are testing similar options. You pay and live without ads. Sounds fair. But let’s slow down and realize what just happened: paying audiences have bought themselves out of advertising but does the platform itself remain attractive to brand advertisers? Not nearly as much.
How big a problem is this right now? Probably not very, for the moment. I tried to estimate the demand for this service in both dollars and users, but neither Google nor Meta disclose this information in their public reporting, it’s often bundled with other services or counted under broader revenue categories.
But we already have one industry that has gone down this road: media. Major global outlets have long been firmly behind paywalls, giving away only a small amount for free. I’d venture to guess that other creators will follow a similar path: cheap (AI slop?) or low-value content gets given away for free to attract new audiences, while the real good stuff sits behind a page with a credit card form.
So, what’s in store for all of us?
I wouldn’t call this trend fully formed yet, but it has definitely started to take shape. What should businesses be prepared for? Let’s try to forecast (think of this as an exercise in imagination and apocalyptic thinking :)).
What awaits brands, and how to respond
It looks very much like the internet could split into two versions: free and premium. I’d compare it to air travel, where passengers choose between economy and business class. Choose economy and you fly in noisy, cramped conditions; business class is about privacy and comfort.
The free internet will be associated with lower-quality content, even more aggressive trackers, the erasure of whatever privacy remains (businesses will need to squeeze the last profits out of those who haven’t yet bought themselves out of advertising), and a sense of being second-rate. The premium internet will be quiet, calm, private, and free of advertising noise (funny how you now have to pay for peace rather than noise). It’s safe to say that not every brand will want to be associated with the atmosphere of the series Altered Carbon, premium brands especially (Hermès doesn’t advertise on bus stops).
Another problem is the inability to target financially capable people. And here, as I see it, brands need to invest not so much in squeezing value from free users, but in owned media: blogs, podcasts, newsletters.
Building relationships with your audience (hello to the new definition of PR that I wrote about earlier) is the new must. Truth be told, the communications paradigm has been shifting for quite some time now: away from outbound (where a brand broadcasts one-way to the whole world) toward inbound (where people seek the brand out and make contact themselves; as a bonus, word-of-mouth kicks in here). The principle is simple: your people should stay with you on your own platforms, and everyone else should want to join them.
How do you do that? Through thoughtful and serious work to create additional value. There’s a temptation to oversimplify this into advice like “make useful content and don’t make useless content” - but we all know that’s no longer enough. Every brand will find its own path. The universal principle here (and of course it sounds more like a toast): after interacting with a brand, the user’s life should be just a little better than it was before.
Value and trust that’s what matters now, and it will only matter more.